Light Work Lab is pleased to announce a series of special Instructor Profiles featuring interviews with our workshop and class instructors. We want you to get to know them, their work and their interests.

Today we interview Dan Boardman who is teaching Book Dummies for Beginners – a class on editing, sequencing and laying out book dummies. This class is geared towards photographers who would like to make a book, but are not sure how to go from a group of images to a cohesive and finished product.

Dan Boardman is a visual artist living in Somerville Massachusetts. He was born in Ontario California, and grew up in Central New York. He is a 2013 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship recipient and his work has recently been exhibited at The Bakalar & Paine Galleries in Boston, MA and Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. He teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a co-founder of Houseboat Press, a non-profit art press that publishes books with great care and little skill.

LWL: What do you like the most about making photo books?

I love to see an idea take shape right in front of my eyes. Somehow an array of images can coagulate to make an experience that is exciting and interesting. It’s like watching amino acids bump into each other in the primordial soup. When the right combination happens BAM you got something.

LWL: Who should take your classes?

Those people who are interested in making a book but have no idea where to start. We will be focusing on editing, sequencing, and strategies to privilege some images over others. Then we are going to talk about how those images get into a book, how that will function, and what it might look like.

LWL: Tell us about your personal work.

My photography and book making tends to focus on little questions, and some very big mysterious ones too. I’m in constant awe of the place we live the the unfathomable
complexity of it. Sometimes I’m struck by the present and the interactions with strangers (72 second window); other times I think about the possible world we are leading to, or leaving behind (The Citizen); other times I think about my very limited perception of the universe (The Family of Man).

LWL: Tell us about Houseboat Press.

The Bell Labs of photobooks! We are entertaining ourselves mostly. Houseboat takes on a few different roles for me. It allows me to be as wild as possible with book making ideas, and to collaborate with artists and other interesting people the world over. We gravitate toward projects that have no shape yet, so we can all find the right path together.

Our mission is to provide direct support to artists working in photography and related media, through residencies, publications, exhibitions, and a community-access lab facility.

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